Degrees of uncertainty: Is being a university graduate losing its value?

SFU geography graduate Michelle Sutton now owns a furniture-making business in Uganda. She says her degree opened her eyes to foreign travel and a greater understanding of the world around her.

It's tough out there making the transition from university to a well-paying job. A degree is no longer a passport to the middle class.XIANGYANG ZHANG
/ Getty Images/iStockphoto

You could say Michelle Sutton wasted years at university. She graduated with a geography degree from Simon Fraser University in 1997 but never found a job ­related to her field.

She went back to Kwantlen Polytechnic University to take an Internet course and began building websites from home.

You could also say her geography degree guided Sutton into a shining destiny. In 2002, she moved to Uganda with her husband, Kevin Sutton, to start a furniture-making business.

They employ eight full-time people in a thriving operation, ramble through eastern Africa on weekends and shoot stunning wildlife photos.

Her friends back home say Sutton’s living a dream. She might not be living that dream had she not caught the bug for foreign lands from one of her SFU profs.

“I love the real-world application of geography. I enjoy being able to look at landscapes and understand them,” says Sutton, 39.

“I also have a greater understanding for the social and geographical elements around me, as well as development, culture and economics.”

The estimated 233,000 people about to start classes at B.C.’s universities this fall might wish to pay attention to Sutton’s experience.

ENRICHING AND IMPOVERISHING

Many, like her, will find ­university enriches their lives beyond anything they could have imagined.

Many of them will find university impoverished them beyond anything they could have imagined.

They will graduate with staggering debt loads and lurch between low-paying jobs as they fail to find work in their field.

Finally, they’ll beat a retreat to college or a trade for more job-focused training. They will belatedly understand what they should have seen from the start: the treacherous disconnect between the job market’s needs and the output of degree-granting sausage ­factories.

Nobody is accusing universities of being manipulative shills desperate to sell students a bill of academic goods. But young people entering university should ask hard questions about the payback on their academic investment, experts say.

Universities are guilty of over-selling the value of a degree, says Bill Morrison, a retired University of Northern B.C. history professor.

“It (university education) is being oversold because the pitch is it will guarantee a good income and it doesn’t guarantee anything,” Morrison says from his Ladysmith home.

“The days are gone when a BA meant you had your ticket punched to the middle class.”

'WILDLY UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS'

University students have ­“wildly unrealistic” expectations of what they’ll earn when they finish school, Morrison says. Surveys show they think they’ll make twice as much as they actually do, he says.

The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada isn’t helping much to realign those expectations with reality, Morrison says.

The association assures university grads that during their working life they will average $1.3 million more than high-school grads, and $1 million more than college grads.

But those averages reflect the earnings of all grads and are skewed higher by the paycheques flowing to doctors, engineers, accountants and lawyers, Morrison says.

“Many people with undergraduate degrees will struggle to find $30,000-a-year positions, leaving them just barely topping the average earnings of high-school graduates,” Morrison says in Campus Confidential, a book co-written with Ken Coates, the second edition of which was published in the spring.

If Canada’s over-production of BAs enables the country’s employers to pay low wages to grads, students who fail to complete a degree can expect even less.

A “dismally large” chunk of university students won’t graduate, Morrison says. Even the best schools, attracting top students, will lose up to 10 per cent of their first-year students to laziness, ­money woes, poor program choices, homesickness and too much beer.

ONE IN SEVEN WILL DROP OUT

Nationally, almost one in seven university students will drop out before they graduate, Morrison and Coates say.

“This dirty little secret needs to be aired,” they add. “If incoming students knew this secret, some of the weaker ones might find a better training option elsewhere.

“ Others might be more motivated and might work harder.”

Some parents nag young people to attend university who have no business being there, Morrison says. They assume that because their children are fairly intelligent they should pursue a white-collar career.

A 2010 Statistics Canada study says 67 per cent of parents want their kids to attend university, while just two per cent want them to ­qualify for a trade. Yet 40 per cent of new jobs in Canada over the next decade will need a trade, Morrison and Coates say.

“The idea that people with brains must get degrees — and that people with no degrees have no brains — is appallingly wrong and unfair,” the authors say.

Gary Herman of B.C.’s Industry Training Authority is modest enough not to agree too ­emphatically with this assessment. After all, the chief operating officer of the province’s trades co-ordinating agency is a certified tool-and-die maker and an executive MBA.

“University is pushed very aggressively and there may not always be the right connection for what’s required in the job market,” he says. “They are not mandated to have a connection to the demand side.”

TRADE VS UNIVERSITY

B.C. is expected to have 100,000 skilled trades openings over the next seven years, thanks to retiring boomers and new capital projects in the energy, mining and shipbuilding sectors, Herman says. That demand, plus the relatively high earnings for trades, will prompt a growing number of university grads to move into the field, he predicts.

University grads hit the job market with a stack of debt taped to their degrees, whereas apprentices earn a rising wage as they go, Herman says. And with more than 100 trades available, there’s something for everyone.

“The trades are a very compelling choice,” he says.

Support for Herman’s position comes from a surprising source: Gage Averill, the dean of arts at the University of B.C.

Canada needs more people to go into trades, Averill says. And many Canadians are locked into an attitude that a university education is the only way to go, he says.

On the other hand, Canadians underestimate the value of an arts degree, Averill says. That value should not be based on financial payback or how many facts can be stuffed into a student’s brain. It should also reflect the transformative power of an arts education.

“We want students to go out with a new skill set, a new sense of themselves and their worth,” Averill says. “We’re training people to think and research and ask the right ­questions.

“We’re training them to work with others, analyze, critique and articulate what they’re doing.”

Universities are also acting on the need to clarify career paths for people in the arts, he says.

TOXIN OF ENTITLEMENT

UBC is ramping up career days and counselling. It has invested in co-op education, and encourages students to study abroad and take part in the local community.

“We’re moving away from a simple transcript with a grade-point average toward students building a sort of portfolio of experience,” Averill says. “We want them to build careers.”

Morrison, for all his reservations about university, stresses that good arts-and-sciences students make terrific employees. But he would like universities, parents and students themselves to be aware of a toxin that undermines good ­intentions.

It’s the toxin of entitlement.

One form of this is the belief that students should study whatever they wish. Morrison questions whether Canada should encourage students to pick their ­studies when up to half of job-seeking ­university grads are unemployed or under-employed.

That broad freedom to choose puts the economy’s skill set at the mercy of 18-year-old first-year students who may not spend enough time exploring the complex and changing job market. If they get it wrong, the economy suffers. So will a generation of students groomed to have high expectations.

“They expect material well-being and an easy passage through school, university and work,” Morrison and Coates say. “Graduates are not entitled to a job.”

STUDENT DEBT BY THE NUMBERS

At $34,886, B.C. students expect to have the country’s biggest debt load when they graduate, according to a recent survey by the Bank of Montreal. That far exceeds the national average of $26,297.

A nation-topping 36 per cent of B.C. students say paying for school is their biggest source of stress. The national average is 28 per cent.

Canadian students expect to pay off their debt in 6.4 years, but according to the Canada student loans program it takes most students almost 10 years, BMO said.

Finding a job after graduation is the top stressor for 19 per cent of B.C. students, the second lowest percentage in the country.

A TD Bank survey found that 25 per cent of post-grad students in B.C. and Alberta graduate with more debt than they expected.

The TD study also said 34 per cent find it hard to make minimum payments on student loans in the first two years after graduating.

“Many admit to delaying a number of life milestones, including buying a first home (42 per cent), starting a family (37 per cent), getting married (21 per cent) and even moving out of their family home (16 per cent) until student debts are repaid,” TD found.

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